Laboratory for XUV ultrafast spectroscopy

The target of the laboratory is the generation and application of ultrashort XUV pulses, with duration in the femtosecond range. Femtosecond XUV pulses are produced by spectrally selecting high-order harmonics with a time-delay compensated monochromator. 

Laser source

The driving source is a Ti:sapphire amplified laser system, which generates 35-fs pulses with an energy of 7 mJ and repetition rate of 1 kHz. These pulses are compressed by using the hollow fiber technique in combination with ultrabroad band chirped mirrors down to 5 fs. 

XUV pulses, produced by high-order harmonic generation, are spectrally selected by a time-delay-compensated monochromator, based on the use of off-plane diffraction mount, where the incident and diffracted wave vectors are almost parallel to the grating grooves. Such off-plane mount allows one to achieve a remarkable improvement in terms of tunability and throughput with respect to the classical diffraction mount. Broadly tunable coherent XUV pulses, with duration as short as 5 fs and high photon fluxes, can be obtained.